USS Great Lakes: More Questions than Answers

U.S. Steel customers are reporting very little information has been flowing out of the company regarding how long the mill hot end will be down. We did hear from one of our industry sources that their information put a restart of the hot end sometime around the 7th of April (Monday of next week). However, from other sources we are hearing that the outage could be as far out as four weeks. No one is quite sure and that probably includes many at USS.

Our sources are advising SMU that US Steel is talking to Severstal Dearborn about the possibility of moving hot pig iron to Severstal and having them roll slabs for USS, then moving them back to Great Lakes. This would allow USS to keep their furnaces running as well as their downstream operations. No decision has made and talks continue. These talks lead us to believe that the facility will be back up by April 7th is wishful thinking.

We have asked USS for guidance and late this afternoon they provided us with the following: “We continue to work on the repairs at Great Lakes Works following the incident from the last week. In the meantime, we are in contact with our customers in an effort to minimize the impact on their operations.”

We did see a lead time sheet for the construction mills of U.S. Steel which reported coated steel lead times running from late April (4/27) on Galvalume out of Double G and Fairfield (Granite City AZ is quoting late May (5/25)). For galvanized, we are seeing lead times on construction product mills from early to mid May at Mon Valley (5/4 & 5/11) and Double G (5/11), to late May at all of their other facilities with galvanneal out of Fairless having the most extended lead time, the first week of June.